There are idiocies that simply happen out of nowhere – and then there are idiocies planned ahead. The only useful thing to be said about the threatened Ben-Hur at the O2 in 2009 is that the venue is one that is now securely associated with disaster. Indeed, an ordinary innocent might even read the promotional statement from German producer Franz Abraham, and file it away as a parody news item. Poor, crazed impresario Mr Abraham has already been planning this live version of Ben-Hur for 15 years. "Right from the beginning," he says, "I aimed to create something completely new, with a high level of artistry, that would excite the audience. The show will have the speed of a musical, the depth of great theatre, the power of a rock concert and the visual opulence of a Hollywood blockbuster."

I don't know about you, but I know I don't deserve all this. Let alone a cast of 400 human performers and 100 animals. I know that the Charlton Heston movie (from 1959) won 11 Oscars and made a fortune. But 1959 was a long time ago, and Ben-Hur was a very strange kind of spectacle and story, with a maudlin belief in the touch of the Christ. It was ever thus, since Lew Wallace wrote it in the evenings in New Mexico while he was trying to keep the peace between Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County ranchers. (Now that could make a play I'd pay to see, and I can imagine the great dome being properly used as a diorama of glorious New Mexico – the land of enchantment.) But this sounds like the circus crossed with a Billy Graham pageant, and I have a horrible feeling of a three-quarters-empty O2 fragrant with the scent of manure.

Not that I'm a killjoy or a philistine. If some genius of mock-epic theatre wanted to do a version of Ben-Hur at a tiny theatre, with children in the parts and a chariot race where cats and dogs dragged children's go-carts around the arena, I'd be there. Indeed, London's Battersea Arts Centre attempted something along those lines a few years ago. In the same way, I still wish I had been there in 1955 when Orson Welles took over the Duke of York's Theatre and put on his own play (by way of Herman Melville) – Moby Dick Rehearsed – in which some New England villagers try to place Melville's epic novel on a tiny stage. There was no whale, no ocean, no ship – just valiant theatrical gestures towards those immense, unmanageable realities, and the Shakespearean dream of "a muse of fire" doing the rest. Let me add that the cast, in addition to Welles, included Gordon Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, Joan Plowright and Kenneth Williams. Those who saw it (it ran less than a month) say it was magic, with all the actors swaying in unison to suggest being on a ship at sea.

Mr Abraham might brood on this example, and curtail his monstrous project – take a week to set it up, make do with ninth best, and do it somewhere so laughably unsuitable that everyone is inspired by the challenge. The O2 has but one fit event – the end of the world (done on the spur of the moment).